New Beginnings

“What’s happened to you?” one of my work colleagues asked me in 2017 and it wasn’t the first time this had been mentioned, so I was starting to get used to it. 

It was almost a year before the changes were as obvious to everyone else as they were to me.  But after the first few comments started coming, it suddenly seemed as though everyone had noticed. My work colleagues were the most interested and surprised. I work in a distributed team for a global, medical technology company, so often we go long periods without seeing one another face to face.  They would look at me in a kind of confused way and say things like “Have you changed your hair?” “Have you been on holiday?” or my favourite “Oh! Sorry Eve! I didn’t recognise you. That’s weird.           

It had all started (or finished, depending on how you look at it) back in 2015 when my life had become so unmanageable that, I had actually purchased a flat in Marchmont without ever having viewed it. As though it were an item of clothing from an online shop. The insanity of that still astounds me! That’s how things were for me back then, but perhaps that’s a story for another day…

Around that time, I used to watch all of you walking to Meadowlark, just near my flat, with yoga mats under your arm, and think to myself “how have all these people got time to go to yoga?”. Little did I know that eventually, I would realise, that my making the time to go would somehow magically create more space for everything in life. One the many paradoxes I’ve discovered through my practice. 

It was the manifestation of that emotional space that my colleagues had started noticing but couldn’t quite put their finger on. 

The changes, while obvious to them, were so profound and life-enhancing for me that I started trying to investigate why they were occurring, but of course I wasn’t sure exactly where to start. So, in 2018 I signed up for Emma Isokivi’s Introduction to Yoga Philosophy workshop at Meadowlark. That workshop sparked a huge desire for more knowledge which led to my enrolling on the Meadowlark 300 hour teacher training last year. 

Fast forward to the March 2020 module of my training group’s YTT and I have never been so grateful to be anywhere. The whole world seemed to be in confusion and yet there I was, surrounded by love and positivity being supported by Karen, Nadine and Amy. They (seamlessly and in the most unruffled way I think I’ll ever witness) transferred our whole YTT group online in a matter of hours, made sure we were all ok and then we just vinyasa’d on! A quick-step change worthy of Fred&Ginger and with just as much style and grace.  This then meant we spent the next few days as a training group learning to teach each other online, which was about to come in a lot handier than I could possibly have realised at that moment. 

I went back to work on the Monday following the first round of business closures and I was struck by just how much stress everyone in my company seemed to be feeling. The contrast between that environment and the one I had just returned from was huge. And then after a few days, something happened that I could never have predicted. My work, actually asked ME to share with my colleagues what I had learned over the last 4 years about becoming more grounded and dealing with stress! And specifically, how to tailor this for the type of business we are in. I was about to put my YTT into practice a lot quicker than I had anticipated. Armed with the support and learning from Karen I was able to put together some short pranayama practices that I have been sharing with colleagues over the last 3 weeks. And the feedback so far is that they want me to carry on doing it while this situation continues. 

My company is even more busy than usual due, in part, to the fact that we are one of the largest companies in the world who make ventilators and it’s been a privilege to be able to support my team in this new way. Their engagement and desire to come and try something new during this extraordinary time has been amazing. The skills I’ve learned and the support I’ve had from Karen and the teaching team at Meadowlark has meant I have been able to, in some small way, bring a bit of calm to our working day. There is no way to adequately express the gratitude I have for this. 

If anyone had asked me for help with wellbeing at work a few years ago (apart from the fact that this quite simply not have happened!) they would probably have been met with a disbelieving laugh and a pithy quote such as, “beware the naked man offering you a shirt!” but, as it stands that’s exactly what my Meadowlark YTT has enabled me to do. It’s also helped me clearly define exactly what I need to do to support my own wellbeing, which I was never able to do before discovering yoga. It’s given me all of that, as well as a true community of like-minded individuals to belong to. The woman who bought her house off the internet in a stressed-out haze could never have written this part of the story.

I’m reminded of one of the most memorable comments from one of my team-mates after I started yoga. She looked at me strangely and said, “Did you…have you…discovered some kind of secret...?” 

“I guess that’s one way of putting it”, I laughed.

- post submitted by Eve, current 200 Hour YT Trainee at Meadowlark